TY - GEN
T1 - Collaborative Medical Delivery Service with UAVs and Human Couriers https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEM58616.2023.10406453
AU - Wan, Pengfu
AU - Xu, Gangyan
AU - Shao, Saijun
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.
PY - 2023/12
Y1 - 2023/12
N2 - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has been widely adopted in logistics systems with improved flexibility, efficiency, and lowered cost. However, limited by capacity and endurance, UAVs often need to cooperate with ground vehicles or humans. This work considers a practical medical delivery problem in which multiple pharmacies share a fleet of vehicles to provide urgent medical delivery services to hospitals. To further improve its operational efficiency while reducing cost, a novel delivery mode is proposed, in which human couriers and UAVs collaboratively fulfill the medical delivery tasks. Considering the heterogeneity of the fleets, the time-sensitive nature of urgent orders, and constraints like vehicle capacities, this problem is modeled as the Multi-depot Pickup and Delivery Problem with Soft Deadlines (MPDPSD), and a heuristic-based method is proposed. Through extensive computational experiments, it is proved that the proposed method can provide feasible solutions with good performance for practical medical delivery service in a short time. In addition, the collaboration mode performs better than conventional human-only mode.
AB - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has been widely adopted in logistics systems with improved flexibility, efficiency, and lowered cost. However, limited by capacity and endurance, UAVs often need to cooperate with ground vehicles or humans. This work considers a practical medical delivery problem in which multiple pharmacies share a fleet of vehicles to provide urgent medical delivery services to hospitals. To further improve its operational efficiency while reducing cost, a novel delivery mode is proposed, in which human couriers and UAVs collaboratively fulfill the medical delivery tasks. Considering the heterogeneity of the fleets, the time-sensitive nature of urgent orders, and constraints like vehicle capacities, this problem is modeled as the Multi-depot Pickup and Delivery Problem with Soft Deadlines (MPDPSD), and a heuristic-based method is proposed. Through extensive computational experiments, it is proved that the proposed method can provide feasible solutions with good performance for practical medical delivery service in a short time. In addition, the collaboration mode performs better than conventional human-only mode.
KW - Logistics Optimization
KW - Medical Delivery Service
KW - Pickup and Delivery Problem
KW - Soft Deadlines
KW - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85186108587&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/IEEM58616.2023.10406453
DO - 10.1109/IEEM58616.2023.10406453
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85186108587
T3 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, IEEM 2023
SP - 1340
EP - 1345
BT - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, IEEM 2023
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, IEEM 2023
Y2 - 18 December 2023 through 21 December 2023
ER -